ances there, Violet,
and no mistake."

"Did I? I don't know that I agree, and at any rate it's all ancient
history, and like most ancient history rather flat and stale and
humdrum. Anyway the whole subject has lost all interest for me."

Squire Courtland looked at his daughter, with a mischievous pucker round
his eyes.

"What instinctive liars all women are," he was saying to himself.

Violet made some excuse, and took herself out of his presence. She had
to, or her temper would have got the upper hand: result--a stormy scene,
recrimination on her part; cold, withering sarcasm on that of her
father; then rancour and bitterness for days. She knew he had never
forgiven her for breaking off her engagement with Lamont; less, that she
had done so than her manner of doing it. And the worst of it was, he
seemed determined never to allow her to forget it; and now the man was
coming back--coming to settle down at his ancestral home, almost, so to
say, next door to them. And--he was bringing with him a bride.

He had been quick to console himself, she reflected, her lips curling
with bitterness--oh yes, quite quick. Only two years. Two years to
this very day. But two years mean a great deal to a man of action; and
following his career in the newspapers, as she had done, this one, whom
she had thrown over, was very much a man of action indeed. For
herself--well, her intimates had noticed a very considerable change in
Violet Courtland. She had gone through her seasons and social
functions, but somehow she had done so listlessly. All her adorers,
whom formerly she had patted and made sit up and fetch and carry, she
now snubbed ruthlessly, including more than one eligible; and what had
formerly afforded her keen enjoyment she now went through perfunctorily.

During the war in Matabeleland she had developed a feverish thirst for
reading newspapers, and about them she had found Lamont's name pretty
frequently strewn in connection with that disastrous rising and a
certain dare-devil corps known as Lamont's Tigers, from the fight at the
Kezane Store onwards. But ever he seemed to be the leader of this or
that desperate venture, wherein the rescue of some outlying, half-armed
band, comprising women and children, was the object, and that against
large odds. And this saviour of his countrymen--and women--from the
horrors of savage massacre, was the man whom she, Violet Courtland, had
denounced that very day two years ago